‘Let’s have a ball and a biscuit, sugah!’

Without attending a single kegger or Happy Hour whoop-de-doo to support her lead, here’s how Associated Press reporter Hannah Dreier set up De Void for a massive heartbreaking disappointment last Friday:

The Associated Press announced that UFO buffs and believers in space aliens celebrated Area 51 being official last week — but the AP didn’t prove it/CREDIT: goldstar.com

“LAS VEGAS (AP) — UFO buffs and believers in space aliens are celebrating the CIA’s clearest acknowledgement yet of the existence of Area 51, the top-secret Cold War test site that has been the subject of elaborate conspiracy theories for decades.” In the next graph, Dreier informs us that the “recently declassified documents have set the tinfoil-hat contingent abuzz on the Internet, though there’s no mention in the papers of UFO crashes, black-eyed extraterrestrials or staged moon landings.”

As a reporter, in the very next graph I expect to read all about the celebrations by all these buffs and believers in space aliens. I mean, put me there, right? Put me right smack-dab in the middle of the glory hole because my mind’s eye is spinning with possibilities. Like, are we talking about urbane high-fiving shaken-not-stirred I-told-you-so yuppies flooding Times Square? Or something more ribald, like the glass-tossing swashbucklers in the Captain Morgan Rum/White Stripes commercial? Or were the celebrations — given the lack of black-eyed aliens and fake moon landings — jovial in a muted sorta way? Like a rainy Tuesday afternoon at Sloppy Joe’s, where it’s great to be off the clock, but dammit all, Duval Street’s flooded and the drum-circle fire-eaters won’t be out tonight …

But no. Instead, you had to read seven more graphs of background and crap like that before Dreier got around to revisiting the setup. And this is how bad the payoff stank. UFO researcher Robert Hastings didn’t appear to be celebrating anything at all: “The government will not release what it knows. My opinion is that whoever is flying these craft will break the story and will reveal themselves at some point in the future. The CIA is not going to release anything they don’t want to talk about.”

Um, where’s the champagne and confetti? Noisemakers and plastic ruffled luau garlands? Sensing, perhaps, she hadn’t quite nailed it, Dreier moved another version a few hours later. This time, she managed to work one of those buffs up into the third paragraph. Alas, this particular buff, “who runs a support group for people like her who believe they have been contacted by extraterrestrials,” didn’t appear to be celebrating, either. All she said was, “I’m thinking that they’re [the CIA] probably testing the waters now to see how mad people get about the big lie and the coverup.”

Aren’t there any tinfoil-hatters buzzing anywhere in this story? Well, read a little farther down in the second version and, hmm, seems as if Hastings’ name has been subbed out for researcher Stan Friedman. But Friedman doesn’t sound all that KC & The Sunshine Band either: “The notion that the U-2 explains most sightings at that time is utter rot and baloney. Can the U-2 sit still in the sky? Make right-angle turns in the middle of the sky? Take off from nothing? The U-2 can’t do any of those things.”

Well, no, U-2s can’t do those things. Nevertheless, the AP and every other MSM outlet made a big splash from a tepid little asterisk last week when the CIA declassified 50-year-old documents stating its spyplanes flew out of Area 51. Zzz. Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive, did a lot of the crowing. He said, “It marks an end of official secrecy about the facts of Area 51. It opens up the possibility that future accounts of this and other aerial projects will be less redacted, more fully explained in terms of their presence in Area 51.”

America learned about Area 51 in a big way back in 1996, when “60 Minutes” did a spread on the sort of state-financed paranoia that values information security over the lives of its worker bees. Two years earlier, the plaintiffs — or survivors of the dead — sued the Air Force and the Environmental Agency (just two of the myriad government agencies with a stake in that restricted federal sprawl) on the grounds that they were injured by inhaling toxic fumes from trash burnoffs. Their physicians wanted to know exactly what sort of chemicals their patients were exposed to in order to administer more effective treatments. But thanks to a 1995 executive order, President Clinton exempted the accused from disclosing classified information and the suit was tossed.

Among the breathtaking lowlights of those proceedings was a manual for Area 51 employees, then available on the Internet, that plaintiff attorney Jonathan Turley attempted to enter into evidence. The Defense Department immediately classified the manual on the grounds that its release could jeopardize military personnel. Irony apparently unintended. Case closed.

Anyway, if they want us to cheer this breakthrough in Area 51 glasnost, let’s wait and see if the employee manual makes it back into the public domain first, for starters. In the meantime, please, AP and everybody else: Don’t taunt me about UFO buffs and believers in space aliens celebrating this runny gruel. Take me to one of those parties. Put me in that special moment, that real moment, so I can feel the heat and get down tonight.

15 comments on “‘Let’s have a ball and a biscuit, sugah!’”

I’m so sorry, Larry. I should have realized how painful it must have been to have found out the Institute your one scientist worked for was completely bogus. Maybe with a little luck a second scientist might actually be found who will declare UFOs to be real. It must be lonely knowing you and Billy are the only two people in the area who are actually believers. Hang in there.

Have you considered moving to New Mexico. I hear there is a town out there where there are a lot of business opportunities catering to the goobers who actually believe in this stuff.

Larry, I am sooo exited. YOu’ve found an actual scientist who believes in UFOs. I guess one in 100,000 is not a bad beginning. Oh, what’s that, he’s not actually a real scientist? Dagnabit! I am so disappointed…and surprised.

Larry; Davis is very definitely a “self-styled” physicist. He’s one of those people who earns the credential but fails in real achievement, allowing his wishful fantasy world to guide his career path instead of rationality and real-world science.

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin was founded by Hal Puthoff, another crackpot with a PhD and infamous for his laughable “remote viewing” stupidity and free-energy nonsense; and he even fell for the brain-dead Scientology bamboozle at one time. So he’s not one of the brighter bulbs even on the crackpot circuit!

So this nobody Davis hangs out in Austin at a privately funded crackpot tank. Who cares what he says about anything, much less his worthless and irrational “UFO” Believers’ default position: Attack the disbelieving world and Scientific skeptics for ufoolery’s failure to make a real-world case for the “UFO” fantasy. That’s very unscientific of him since the burden of evidence and proof lies with the advocate.

We could name a dozen other Believers in the “UFO” myth and delusion with PhDs and they’re all crackpots. Are you getting it, Larry?

About Davis’s “psychic teleportation” insanity, physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University said,”It is in large part crackpot physics.”
“Hello, Larry!”

I’m pretty sure I know why the “tin-foilers” didn’t party, or for that matter any regular citizen who even reads occasionally. They were all probably numb from the confusion of being told the existence of Area 51 has just been confirmed. You mean, the 60 Minutes segment, the federal lawsuit, Jonathan Turley speaking about it both on UFO documentaries and on political shows on MSNBC, the fact that anyone who drives close to it is met by security, AND the fact that it is easily viewable on Google Earth, wasn’t our first confirmation years ago?

And by the way, why is it when something like this nonexistent news is put on one site, it is picked up everywhere, but when people are dying from working at Area 51 and a federal suit is initiated, you only hear about it in a few, isolated places?

Eric Davis, Physicist, Explains Why Scientists Won’t Discuss Their UFO Interests: “They’re wrong, naive, stubborn, narrow-minded, afraid and fearful. It’s a dirty word and a forbidden topic.”
Whenever Believers’ cognitive dissonance rises to the level of awareness that the world doesn’t share their “UFO” delusion, their release and tired irrational default is to attack that disbelieving world and Scientific skeptics for their own failure to make a real-world case for the “UFO” fantasy.
Larry; Eric Davis may be a self-styled “physicist,” but he’s still an irrational BELIEVER in so-called paranormal nonsense. Yes, Eric Davis can be a PhD and still be an irrelevant crackpot.

Orang, I’m not sure exactly which stories you’re referring to, but my cursory reading of that news cycle suggests most of them borrowed heavily from the AP. It’s not unusual for papers to rework national/international stories to suit their unique readerships so long as they cite original sourcing. That said, let me also point out that, like so many “pundits” who’ve had fun with the material, I’m pretty much a leech when it comes to these things. Like so many reporters, I don’t have a lot of time or resources to invest in much front-end coverage of a subject considered so marginal by so many. What I like to do, when possible, is followup reporting. Classic example is the outstanding and vastly overlooked investigation by Sign Oral History Project and Tom Tulien into the Minot, N.D., UFO incident(s) over U.S. nuclear missile fields in 1968. Tulien moved it exclusively online in 2011, but so far as I can tell, no one in the MSM picked it up. This was an important case, but the best I could do was arrange followup interviews http://devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/12058/picking-up-where-jennings-left-off/ with the veteran airmen who participated in what was clearly a national-security challenge. There was nothing original in my reporting — it was more like verification — but it’s something I wish the MSM would do more of, instead of parroting or rephrasing the same old stuff. (Somehow I don’t think I’ve answered your question — sorry.)

“They’re wrong, naive, stubborn, narrow-minded, afraid and fearful. It’s a dirty word and a forbidden topic. Science is about open-minded inquiry. You shouldn’t be laughing off people. You should show more deference and respect to them … Scientists need to get back to using the scientific method to study things that are unknown and unusual, and the UFO subject is one of them.”

Wrong, naive, stubborn, narrow-minded, afraid and fearful is a very apt description of you, Duff.

It must really hurt when reasonable people, people who have actually heard of and apply Occums Razor to these “phonomena”, chide you UFOers about your tin foil hats! Life can sometimes be very entertaining.

When I first heard about this official history, I immediately thought of Annie Jacobsen’s book on the history Area51 (the one with the small bit at the end about an Area51 employee having knowledge relating to Roswell). I guess the CIA preferred an alternative ending.

Billy, I’m glad that you wrote about this so-called big news story that is actually a non-story. The subject matter here appears to be classic dis or mis information, with a truth (area 51 is real and also non-news) mixed in with a lie (U2 spy planes explain UFOs and also non-news as it was released by the CIA in 1997 by CIA professor of revisionist history Gerald Haines). I noticed that the TV media really fell for it as they always do, and the printed media, including internet news sites, also did. I have some journalism questions for you. Most of the printed media stories about this release appeared to be bylines because the authors’ names were provided. I thought that when story is a byline, the author can augment the story with some of his/her own personal fact gathering. None of this was done at all by any of these byline journalists. Are most journalists lazy? Do most of them simply slightly modify what comes off the news wire? Why do they accept only a single source for their articles? Do they really get paid for such little effort? PS I don’t think you are lazy.